


With Each Revision, Improve

by Project0506



Series: Soft Wars [110]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Feels, Character Study, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:00:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26114578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Project0506/pseuds/Project0506
Summary: Jango comes in search of his son.
Series: Soft Wars [110]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683775
Comments: 27
Kudos: 315





	With Each Revision, Improve

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Five Blankets (And One Nap)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24872899) by [Project0506](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Project0506/pseuds/Project0506). 



> Large parts of this was in the original version of the final chapter of Blankets and a Nap, but it very much did not fit the tone I was going for. So it got stripped out and here it is. It's. yeah. It's what it is.

They weren’t supposed to be people.

The antigrav cuts out and the V-18 Courier slides to a stop without even a shudder. Braces engage silently, the speeder barely bobs on suspension. Someone put a lot of time and care into her: V-18s were already ancient when Jango a child. The clone sits quiet for long seconds, taps twice on the steering in declaration.

“Don’t start trouble on my planet, Prime.”

Jango braces for that roil of anger familiar as an old friend. He digs and digs but these days he’s finding the well’s been tapped dry. The most he can dredge is a puff of old exhaustion, worn thin. He grits his teeth.

“I just want my kid.”

The clone, the Anomaly, laughs. Bitterness doesn’t suit Jango’s voice. “Of course you do.”

The canopy disengages and Jango has nothing to say to that. He hops the side. A second later, the Anomaly follows.

They weren’t supposed to be people. He locks his teeth against the words; he’s not a damn fool.

There’s the echo of a gorgeous bruise under his left ear, memory faint under the square of bacta. The top of his spine throbs where the Anomaly’s blow could have knocked him clear off his feet if he hadn’t braced.

“Offer of a medic is still open.”

Jango drops his hand from his neck. “It’s fine,” he says. The vague, dispassionate contrition in the clone’s eyes is almost worse than that quarter second of familiar rage before the blow landed. He’ll find a medic somewhere, get it checked. Once he gets his son and leaves. “Expected a blaster.”

The Anomaly huffs a pretense at amusement. “Wouldn’t waste the bolt,” he says and it isn’t really a joke.

This sprawling homestead used to be a Protector training site, Jango thinks, if he has his orientation is right. It looks different not-bombed. There’s a brand new single story stretch of what looks like dorms reaching back from where the sidewalls had blown out. Someone’s cut away the char from the old Altiri veshok that stands sentry over the outer courtyard, packed new dirt around its roots. Its branches reach blue and white and fragrant for meters around.

He would have sworn the thing was dead, when he’d seen it last. He’d have sworn a lot of things he’s finding false.

The clones were never supposed to be people. That was the point.

_Too wild_ the snakes had tutted about Skirata's Omegas. _Too independent_ they’d tutted about his own Alphas. _We’ll have the design perfected before full production_ , they’d reported to their unnamed backer. They’d assured their sponsor and Jango both that, with the first batch of commandos, they had succeeded.

Were they wrong? Did their design deteriorate? Or had they always been lying, salesmen to the last?

He’d wondered, in his quiet moments, why the snakes even wanted a Fett. They’d stripped out everything that made a Fett from his genes after they made his son. They’d taken the predisposition to two different types of cancer and alcoholism, but they’d also taken the thousand-year remnants of Taung, everything of the Zabrak but the eyes. They twisted his height, played with his build.

Removed, they’d claimed, his persistent individuality. His fire. If they wanted a drone, he’d thought, they should have hunted up a Cadera; that clan had always thrown followers. Maybe a branch Vizsla. If one of _them_ found an independent thought in their head they’d have thought it was shrapnel.

“It’s just after lunch, they’ll be somewhere inside still.” Jango can barely make out the clone’s voice. The past drowns him out almost entirely.

Still-familiar thin fronds of grass crunch under his boots. The wood of the veshok hums and it takes a moment for Jango to remember they used to install the forcefield generators in their hollows. Kept them up off the ground and covered: they had a tendency to short when it hailed. It’s been decades since he thought of this place, decades more since he’s stood on this ground. Decades, since he’d heard infighting drove the last of her residents off to practice their clan traditions in hidden secret. Good riddance, he’d thought. Let it die, let it stand testament to the hypocrisy of all sides in this war of personal preferences imposed. This was a dead world, used up and discarded and left only as silent recrimination. Overtaken by the monsters Mandalorians had once joyfully kept in balance.

The third moon sails through the daytime sky, trailing a cloud of shattered rock the blue sun sparks bright white. The tail’s smaller now. The Protectors had plans once, to removethe debris before they could break from Chrono’s orbit, crash into the planet. Moot, when everyone started fleeing. The clones must have done it anyway. Because it matters now; people live here again.

Some. They removed some of it. Left enough that it’s a headache to navigate. The garbage they could have swept up if they wanted stands a lethal sentry to the unwary. The debris field flickers like jewels in the sky. Grass underfoot just barely shimmers in response.

The rumble of generators sound like safety and the crushed stems under his boots smell of memory; Jango wishes for his bucket.

A burst of laughter wings through the air. On some cue, a knot of children tumble and roll out of the new construction, bellowing in all directions, scrambling just ahead of -

That’s not Boba, he doesn’t think. It’s not Boba snagging one of the boys around the middle and flipping him to dangle by his ankles. It’s not Boba that descends on the pair, lecture clear in his tone even while distance steals the words. It’s not Boba that chases a small boy right up into the branches of the veshok, who softens his knees to take the impact of him leaping onto his back. It’s not Boba, walking and reading and dodging the stampede without once looking up. None of these are Boba.

Probably.

Jango can’t be sure.

That’s the killing blow there, isn’t it? Jango knows his son. He’s loved his son from the moment he was even a concept. He loved his son months before the snakes put the small, red screechy, wriggly blanket-wrapped tuber-shaped creature into Jango’s suddenly-clumsy arms. The tiny, perfect fingers that wound around his thumb caught him tight and held him fast. Jango has never done anything, held anything, as magnificent as his son.

Jango doesn’t know which of these boys is his son.

“Prime?”

He doesn’t know what the clone wants. He can’t make himself care.

An Anomaly, Jango had thought, when he’d heard of the desertion. There’d been ones that popped up before: some throwback that undid the genetic manipulation. Caught, usually, before they’d proved too disruptive to the grand design. One must have slipped through the cracks, he’d thought. An Anomaly must have wrenched command of the army and ordered the rest all here, set himself up as king. A genetic mutation sparked an unaccounted-for sliver of free-will, and it took control of the commands that direct the cloned masses.

Fixed, the snakes had said. An entirely biddable design. The percentage of deviations from baseline were negligible. Their genius had created clean-slate organic automatons and Jango could never bare to see his father’s mother’s sister’s face blank-eyed staring back at him. Awaiting orders. Not _willing_ to die but completely unaware there was anything else to want. The thought turned bile in his stomach and for more than a decade instead he’d looked away.

He hears his son before he sees him.

The cluster he’s in is smaller, spread wider. A handful of teens, a couple of adults. Contact fleeting, close but not sprawled over and around each other the way Jango’s seen so many of them do so far. Friendly, but with a distance Jango can’t interpret. He knows it can’t be anything but his fault.

Boba has his shoulder caught under a clone’s arm, longsuffering in the face of the boy’s enthusiasm. Valiantly ignoring the boy’s antics, in favor of the man in step with him. Jango’s eyes could have slid right past them. Would have; did. His eyes slide right by them as they troop out into the sunlight and it is a staccato clatter of their conversation that catches him.

(Arla had raged, when she’d finally resurfaced. She’d threatened to take his _ kait _1, threatened to put a bolt right through the _ taliit _2 inscribed over his heart. Had threatened to take his son. She’d dug herself into Slave I and would not be budged for months, not until Boba could Speak.

Because how dare a son of Fett not know their language? How dare Jango keep a child of Concordia’s blood from of her words? How _dare he_ raise the boy on the cud-chewing herd’s so-called _Basic_. On the soulless colonizers’ so-called _Standard_? “Will you be as useless a father as you are a _ Mand'alor _3?” she had chirped, poison-sweet.

Whoever had taken her, they’d sharpened her into something needle-precise and unerringly lethal. None of her shots ever miss anymore.)

Jango doesn’t speak to Boba in Concordian. Arla refuses to speak to either of them in anything but. But maybe Arla sporadic visits weren’t enough. That would – it would make sense. That Boba would come here to find someone to Speak with.

There’s no recognition in Boba’s eyes. Jango’s feet slow to a stop.

There’s no recognition in Boba’s eyes. There’s wariness, curiosity. There’s both that and worlds more in the eyes of the boy slung over his shoulders. There’s polite confusion bubbling to alert in one adult; the other is already pushing forward, his eyes going past Jango’s shoulder searching for threats.

There’s his grandmother’s freckles peeking out of one of the adults’ beard, her calculation in his eyes. There’s her smirking slash of teeth in the other, her suggestion of leashed violence in the shoulders. And the neither of the boys they bracket is Boba. The hair is too short, shoulders too broad, now that he’s looking. This isn’t his son, this child speaking his ancestors’ tongue under his ancestors’ sky.

“ _ Ne net _1,” Jango chokes, words he hasn’t uttered in decades. “Ne net.” His shoulder smacks the hovering clone in his retreat. He doesn’t stop. Doesn’t turn at the murmurs and swear behind him.

He shouldn’t have come. He shouldn’t have followed Boba, should have trusted he would do whatever he planned and return, just like every other time he’s disappeared for days, weeks at a time.

He shouldn’t have come here, where children with Boba’s curly hair, his tan chubby cheeks run free and screeching across land Jango had long given up on. This place, long promised to the children of Fett and a dozen other clans, this place where Boba should have grown up: Jango shouldn’t be here.

“Prime,” his voice calls from his flank. The man that isn’t an anomaly at all jogs in his wake. The V-18’s front hull presses cool back against Jango’s curled fist.

“Where’s my son, clone,” he says, echoes of the words he’d said when he’d first stepped out onto the world that bore him. Echoes of words that got him nearly taken off his feet, now devoid of their barbs.

The clone didn’t bring him here out of kindness. It wasn’t some remnant mandate to comply huddling unnoticed beneath the rebellion.

Stand-off, he sees first. Nonthreatening body language, enough space that Jango wouldn’t feel crowded, if he was given to such. Eyes half on his comm, half on Jango himself. Stance set for movement.

Someone got his father’s anxiety. Enough someones that this clone knows how to handle that moment when fear sharpens weapons and aims them outward. What possible benefit could the snakes have had, leaving that in? How much control did they actually have over their supposed design?

Jango wets his lips. He lets his hands fall open-palmed to his side and the clench of the clone’s shoulder eases. “Where’s my _son_?”

The clone's scar dominates the shape of the his face, but it is Arla’s fire in the his eyes that truly defines him. It’s her assassin’s skill to pin-point strike at guarded weakness. “Wait here, Fett” the clone says, poison sweet. “I’ll try to find him.”

There’s nothing Jango wants to do less. He dips his chin sharply. What choice does he have?

Jango rode in the waves of fury to challenge whatever genetic mishap thought he had the right to add Jango’s son to his collection.

Children laugh and overrun their brothers. Children organize themselves into rings, chase each other for no gain, no training value.

The clones were never supposed to be people.

Jango leans against the V-18. Boys try to cajole adults to teach them swears in Concordian. Adults pretend a debilitating addiction to sweetened, thickened milk.

Jango waits. What else can he do?

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. (Concordian/JP Mando'a) Chestplate. Equivalent of Standard Mando'a 'gaid'. Back  
> 2\. (Concordian/JP Mando'a) Sigil or clan mark worn on armor. Equivalent of Standard Mando'a 'aliit'. Back  
> 3\. (Standard and Concordian Mando'a) The Sole Ruler of Mandalorians. Back  
> 4\. (Concordian/JP Mando'a) Sorry (casual). The Standard Mando'a base 'ni ne' is a fan-theorized colloquialization that made the rounds on Tumblr. Back  
> All instances of Concordian Mando'a are made up by me, who is definitely not a CONLANG knowing person by any stretch and could very easily make no sense. I just like the feel of em, so they're my thing now.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [poison tree](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26999608) by [Ro29](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ro29/pseuds/Ro29)




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